The present invention relates generally to relational databases for storing and retrieving biological information. More particularly the invention relates to systems and methods for providing sequences of biological molecules in a relational format allowing retrieval in a client-server environment.
Informatics is the study and application of computer and statistical techniques to the management of information. In genome projects, bioinformatics includes the development of methods to search databases quickly, to analyze nucleic acid sequence information, and to predict protein sequence, structure and function from DNA sequence data.
Increasingly, molecular biology is shifting from the laboratory bench to the computer desktop. Today's researchers require advanced quantitative analyses, database comparisons, and computational algorithms to explore the relationships between sequence and phenotype. Thus, by all accounts, researchers can not and will not be able to avoid using computer resources to explore gene sequencing, gene expression, and molecular structure.
One use of bioinformatics involves studying an organism's genome to determine the sequence and placement of its genes and their relationship to other sequences and genes within the genome or to genes in other organisms. Such information is of significant interest in biomedical and pharmaceutical research, for instance to assist in the evaluation of drug efficacy and resistance. To make genomic information manipulation easy to perform and understand, sophisticated computer database systems have been developed. In one database system, developed by Incyte Pharmaceuticals, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., genomic sequence data is electronically recorded and annotated with information available from public sequence databases. Examples of such databases include GenBank (NCBI) and TIGR. The resulting information is stored in a relational database that may be employed to determine relationships between sequences and genes within and among genomes.
Genetic information for a number of organisms has been catalogued in computer databases. Genetic databases for organisms such as Eschericia coli, Haemophilus influenzae, Mycoplasma genitalium, and Mycoplasma pneumoniae, among others, are publicly available. At present, however, complete sequence data is available for relatively few species, and the ability to manipulate sequence data within and between species and databases is limited.
While genetic data processing and relational database systems such as those developed by Incyte Pharmaceuticals, Inc. provide great power and flexibility in analyzing genetic information, this area of technology is still in its infancy and further improvements in genetic data processing and relational database systems will help accelerate biological research for numerous applications.